Recommendation:
CRITICAL NEED FOR SUPPORT- The ANG needs to lead the way on improving the avionics infrastructure of the KC-135 to reduce costs and increase ease of maintenance on obsolete equipment. This can be done by changing to an open architecture digital backbone structure. Update the analog aircraft infrastructure of the KC-135 to a digital backbone to allow for cheaper and easier maintenance as well as providing additional combat capability faster. This upgrade will also support combat capability modernization at a faster rate to keep pace with peer adversaries. Once validated on the KC-135, this technology should be migrated to the rest of the legacy Mobility Fleet. STATES IMPACTED - All ANG KC-135 Aircraft site MISSION CRITICAL NEED with other mobility aircraft approaching obsolescence and associated States- The new baseline avionics should be based on modularity and open architecture, not form factor replacement. It should allow for rapid and easy integration of third party software and hardware with no vendor locked restrictions. It should utilize existing industry standards of: OpenVPX, Hardware Open Systems Technologies (HOST) / Sensor Open System Architecture (SOSA), Avionics Application Standard Software Interface (ARINC 653), Future Airborne Capability Environment (FACE), Open Mission System (OMS) / Universal Command and Control Interface (UCI) among others. The system should provide both safety critical and general purpose processing capability for 3rd party software. The system should be provided with a qualified tools suite to allow for parallel application development. All associated software will be military cyber resilience and security standards. The system should be capable of obtaining and maintaining Development Assurance Level A (DAL-A) certification. Input and output (IO) processing should be capable of ingesting and re-publishing legacy connections and information standards, such as 1553, as well as significant Ethernet IO options Data and storage should be significant on-board with options to add additional modular storage with low data transfer latency and commonly obtainable connections for data loading in mission planning areas. Processing capability should be modular via chassis and backplane design considerations. The system should also be able to function within a cross-domain guarded environment. System replacement options will be a commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) or government-off-the-shelf (GOTS) item. DEPLOYMENT JUSTIFICATION- The ANG has identified and validated systemic shortfalls in the supply system for various components of the current KC-135 avionics infrastructure.